"Plundering the Egyptian Treasure"
When John of Morigny explains, in the Book of Visions, why he felt entitled to draw on the language and structure of the condemned ars notoria for his own Liber florum, he reaches for a specific, well-established biblical trope: he "explicitly plunders the ars notoria, pulling its 'sacred and divine words' into his own book 'as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptian treasure'" (Fanger, Rewriting Magic, p.2).
The allusion is to Exodus 12:35–36, where the Israelites, departing Egypt, are described as having despoiled the Egyptians of gold, silver, and clothing at God's own prompting. Augustine of Hippo developed this passage into a durable exegetical justification for Christian use of pagan learning: just as the Israelites took Egyptian gold and put it to a better, sanctified use, Christian scholars may extract true or useful material from non-Christian or otherwise suspect sources without thereby endorsing those sources' errors. Fanger identifies John's own use of the trope as directly in this Augustinian line.
The trope does real conceptual work for John's project. It allows him to treat the ars notoria's prayers and structure as raw material that was never wholly bad — gold, not dross — while still maintaining that the ars notoria itself, as a complete system, was demonically contaminated and rightly condemned. This is the same move that lets John rewrite rather than simply abandon ritual practice after each condemnation (1315 and 1323): the underlying premise that structured prayer can licitly obtain divine knowledge survives even as the specific vehicle for it is repeatedly purified and re-authorized. See Ars Notoria and Old Compilation / New Compilation.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015, p.2.
Sources
- Fanger, Claire, Rewriting Magic: An Exegesis of the Visionary Autobiography of a Fourteenth-Century French Monk (2015), p.2 — Direct quotation of the trope.
Literature
- Fanger, Claire. Rewriting Magic. Penn State University Press, 2015.